Massive blaze in SW Houston kills 4 firefighters

13 others are injured

Updated 7:40 pm, Tuesday, November 26, 2013

What started as a small restaurant fire - a bit of business faced daily by firefighters everywhere - turned into a motel- engulfing inferno that claimed the lives of four responders from the Houston Fire Department when part of the building collapsed on them Friday. It was the department's worst loss of life ever.

"We arrived on the scene and about 14 minutes after our arrival we had a mayday," HFD Chief Terry Garrison said.

In an instant or close to it, a group of firefighters who had put themselves in deliberate jeopardy out of concern that people might be trapped inside the Southwest Inn were buried in burning debris. The precise series of events is at the heart of an investigation to be led by ATF specialists, who arrived at the scene later in the day. But the gist of it was clear in seconds.

"We had an early and quick catastrophic failure of the roof," Garrison said. "There's no way that I would have anticipated that we would lose four firefighters. I want to tell the residents of Houston their firefighters acted absolutely courageously today, that there was probably a dozen acts of heroism on that scene."